North Korean conference to pave the way for succession

NORTH KOREA will this week launch its biggest political meeting for 30 years, apparently paving the way for another dynastic succession in the impoverished hardline communist nation.

The Workers’ Party conference, scheduled to begin today, was delayed from early September for reasons which – like much else in the reclusive country – remain a mystery to the outside world.

It will be the first major ruling party gathering since 1980, when current leader Kim Jong-Il was publicly confirmed as eventual successor to his own father and the North’s founding president Kim Il-Sung, who died in 1994.